The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
In 2004, due to typhoons, the Shinkansen total annual delays were 42 seconds. It was a disgrace to Japan. (source)
If a train were to be late for 5 minutes, everyone receives a free journey and an apology from the conductor. If a train is delayed 10 minutes, it would be in the newspaper.
So to say train delays are serious business would be an understatement. And last week, knowing what I knew about trains and average delays, I began snapping the following photos, unfolding in time, to mark the first major delay of a Japanese Shinkansen in 2011.
We were taking a 1:35PM train to Tokyo.
1:32PM: Train nowhere to be seen. Passengers seem anxious.
1:33PM: The train arrives. On the platform, hundreds of people wait with their babies, luggage and tourist maps. “We’re going to get a refund!” I realize, excitedly.
1:34PM: The train pulls all the way into the station. Forget a 5 minute delay, this one’s going to be 10 minutes or more. I can see the newspaper headlines with each passing second.
1:34/1:35PM: First of all, can you believe I caught my camera changing minutes? Second of all, it’s 1:35PM. THE 60 SECOND COUNT DOWN HAS BEGUN! WE ARE GOING TO BE LATE! THERE’S STILL A LINE OUTSIDE OUR CAR! WE’LL BE AT LEAST 10 TO 15 MINUTES TO LOAD ALL THESE PEOPLE! History is, clearly, in the making. GOOD THING I HAVE ALL THESE PHOTOS! Maybe the newspaper will want them for tomorrow’s story!
1:35PM: The train is moving.
*jaw drops*
1:36PM: We are already going like a zillion miles an hour. I am devastated.
So in short, the Japanese Shinkansen train is on time. It’s always on time. There are no refunds. There is no formal apology from the conductor. There will be no newspaper article. It’s just another day in efficiently fabulous Japan. Guess I’ll have to get my train-delay fix back on San Francisco’s Muni train.
Today we take photos for granted. They are our memories of holidays and parties, of people and places. An explosion of cameras and places to share them (Facebook, twitter, instagram) means that our lives today are documented, not by an occasional oxidizing of silver halide but constantly recorded with GPS coordinates and time stamps. However it hasn't always been like this - the oldest photograph is less than 200 years old[1].
So how many "Kodak memories" has humanity recorded? How fast are we snapping photos today? And how many of these treasured memories are confined to our shoeboxes as lost relics of a pre-digital era?
First we quantify how many analog photos humans have taken. There is a surprising dearth of direct data, but we can make some reasonable estimates. It is safe to say that at most a few million photos were snapped before the invention of the first consumer camera - Kodak Brownie in 1901[2]. From that time we can use Kodak's employment statistics as a reasonable proxy for how many photos were taken (Kodak’s dominance of those "Kodak moments" persisted for most of the 20th century). More physical photos needed more physical cameras and rolls of print[3]. Throughout this period photos became more and more mass-market - by 1960 it is estimated that 55% of photos were of babies. From 1984 onwards the Silver Institute and PMIA published estimates of how many physical photos the world was snapping each year (silver halide being an important chemical in film)[4]. Year after year these numbers grew, as more people took more photos - the 20th century was the golden age of analog photography peaking at an amazing 85 billion physical photos in 2000 -- an incredible 2,500 photos per second.
At the dawn of the new millennium a new technology (that Kodak itself invented) was reshaping the whole industry - the digital photo. When the first few hundred thousand digital cameras shipped in 1997 their memory was strictly limited (in fact cameras like the Sony Mavica took floppy disks[5]!). Digital cameras are now ubiquitous - it is estimated that 2.5 billion people in the world today have a digital camera[6]. If the average person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over 70 billion photos to Facebook, suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there[7]. Already Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.[8]
Even accounting for population growth the exponential growth of photos is incredible (we take 4 times as many photos as 10 year ago). Today every party, birthday, sports game and concert is documented in rich detail. The combination of all these photos is a rich portrait of today, the possibilities of which are illustrated by a tool like “The Moment”. As photos keep growing we take a clearer and clearer snapshot of our lives and world today - in total we have now taken over 3.5 trillion photos. The kind of photos we are taking has changed drastically - analog photos have almost disappeared - but the growth of photos continues.
In the midst of the 3.5 trillion photos that have ever been taken it's easy to forget that the shoebox or album of old photos we have at home is incredibly fragile and special. Every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s. In fact, ten percent of all the photos we have were taken in the past 12 months. And yet, there are still more physical photos hidden in our shoeboxes, hanging on our walls or lost in an album than there are digital photos littering our hard drive. These precious photos of the past 200 years tell us who we are and where we come from. So grab hold of that photo of you as a kid or of your grandparents' wedding and realize just how special it is.
Footnotes
Here is an amazing glimpse into the dark side of the force that is Hollywood economics. The actor who played Darth Vader still has not received residuals from the 1983 film "Return of the Jedi" because the movie, which ranks 15th in U.S. box office history, still has no technical profits to distribute.
How can a movie that grossed $475 million on a $32 million budget not turn a profit? It comes down to Tinseltown accounting. As Planet Money explained in an interview with Edward Jay Epstein in 2010, studios typically set up a separate "corporation" for each movie they produce. Like any company, it calculates profits by subtracting expenses from revenues. Erase any possible profit, the studio charges this "movie corporation" a big fee that overshadows the film's revenue. For accounting purposes, the movie is a
money "loser" and there are no profits to distribute.
Confused? Imagine you're running a lemonade stand with your buddy Steve. Your mom says you have to share half your profits with your sister. But you don't wanna! So you pretend your buddy Steve is actually a corporation -- call him Steve, Inc -- charging you rent for the stand, the spoon, etc. "Dang, mom, I don't have any profits, I had to pay it all to Steve, Inc!" you say when you come home. But the money isn't gone. It's as good as yours -- in your best friend's pocket.
So: "Return of the Jedi" is a $475 million lemonade stand.
Hollywood can't really work like this, you're thinking. But it does. Last year, the website Techdirt revealed a balance sheet from "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", which, under Hollywood accounting, ended up with a $167 million "loss" even though it's one of the top grossing films of the last decade. Warner Bros. charged about $350 million in distribution, advertising, and interest fees to this external corporation. Here's the receipt.
This brings us back to Darth. "Return of the Jedi" made almost half a billion dollars. But Return of the Jedi, Inc, still has no profit to pay its famous villain because the movie corp has paid so much of its revenue back to the studio in distribution fees. Here's actor David Prowse, via Techdirt:
"I get these occasional letters from Lucasfilm saying that we regret to
inform you that as Return of the Jedi has never gone into profit, we've
got nothing to send you. Now here we're talking about one of the biggest
releases of all time," said Prowse. "I don't want to look like I'm
bitching about it," he said, "but on the other hand, if there's a pot of
gold somewhere that I ought to be having a share of, I would like to
see it."
Most corporations try to make a profit by limiting costs. Movies corporations manage to record a loss by maximizing costs. Only in Hollywood, indeed.
This speech, in which a CIA intelligence analyst analyst tries to explain to officials at a National Security Council meeting something about the reliability of subjectivity, taste and evidence, struck me as an interesting parable for the practice, and uses, of criticism.
A parable about film criticism from AMC's "Rubicon." from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.
“In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don’t really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that’s called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time.”
— Gert Dumbar
(via frankchimero)
Below are twenty-five pieces of vital information that every man over 14 in the Western world should know. Every man. No excuses. Seriously. Seriously.
- Unbutton the bottom button of your jacket. It’s not intended to be buttoned.
- Same goes for your vest.
- Remove the tags on the sleeves of your jacket before you wear it.
- Jackets sometimes come with white basting thread on their shoulders or holding closed their vents. Remove this thread before wearing the jacket.
- Jacket pockets are intended to be opened. Use a small scissor or seam ripper.
- More than three jacket buttons is never appropriate for anything.
- On a three-button coat, buttoning the top button is optional, and some lapels are rolled so as to make the top button ornamental. In other words: if buttoning the top button seems wrong, it is.
- Brown shoes, brown belt. Black shoes, black belt.
- Belt or suspenders. Never belt and suspenders.
- Your jacket sleeve should be short enough to show some shirt cuff - about half an inch.
- Your pants should end at your shoes without puddling. A slight or half break means that there is one modest inflection point in the front crease. If your pants break both front and back or if they break on the sides, they’re too long.
- Your coat should follow and flatter the lines of your upper body, not pool around them. You should be able to slip a hand in to get to your inside breast pocket, but if the jacket’s closed and you can pound your heart with your fist, it’s too big.
- When you buy a suit or sportcoat, it should be altered to fit by a tailor. This will cost between $25 and $100.
- Your tie should reach your belt line - it shouldn’t end above your belt or below it.
- Your tie knot should have a dimple.
- Only wear a tie if you’re also wearing a suit or sportcoat (or, very casually, a sweater). Shirt, tie and no jacket is the wedding uniform of a nine-year-old.
- The only men who should wear black suits during the day are priests, undertakers, secret agents, funerals attendees and yokels.
- Cell phone holsters are horrible.
- So are square-toed shoes.
- Never wear visible socks with shorts.
- Or any socks with sandals.
- If your shirt is tucked in, you should be wearing a belt (or suspenders, if you’re wearing a jacket as well, or your trousers should have side adjusters and no belt loops).
- Flip flops are great for the pool and the beach and not great for anything else. (Some say this is a matter of taste. We agree. If you have any taste, you will only wear flip-flops at the beach or pool.)
- Long ties are not appropriate with a tuxedo.
- Never wear polyester outside of the gym or theme parties.
Efforts to regulate playground equipment to prevent injuries may stunt emotional development, a new study suggests.
"We’re tired of websites abusing our trust and storing our passwords in plain text, exposing us to danger. Here we put websites we believe to be practicing this to shame."
It's in your airports, your coffee shops and your libraries: "Free Public WiFi."
Despite its enticing name, the network, available in thousands of locations across the United States, does not actually provide access to the Internet. But like a virus, it has spread — and may even be lurking on your computer right now.
Wireless security expert Joshua Wright first noticed it about four years ago at an airport.
"I went to connect to an available wireless network and I saw this option, Free Public WiFi," he remembers. "As I looked more and more, I saw this in more and more locations. And I was aware from my job and analysis in the field that this wasn't a sanctioned, provisioned wireless network, but it was actually something rogue."
Free Public WiFi isn't set up like most wireless networks people use to get to the Internet. Instead, it's an "ad hoc" network — meaning when a user selects it, he or she isn't connecting to a router or hot spot, but rather directly to someone else's computer in the area.
Though it doesn't actually provide Internet access, the network has spread across the country thanks to an old Windows XP bug.
How It Works
When a computer running an older version of XP can't find any of its "favorite" wireless networks, it will automatically create an ad hoc network with the same name as the last one it connected to -– in this case, "Free Public WiFi." Other computers within range of that new ad hoc network can see it, luring other users to connect. And who can resist the word "free?"
Not a lot of people, judging from the spread of Free Public WiFi. Computers with the XP bug that try to connect to the Internet will remember the name, create their own ad hoc networks and entice other users wherever they go.
Microsoft is aware of the issue and says it has eliminated the network in more recent versions of Windows. It also created a fix to the problem for the older version of Windows XP — Windows XP Service Pack 3 — but many people still haven't updated their computers.
That means, Wright says, the network continues to spread across the country like something from a horror movie — the kind "where a zombie takes a hold of one person, bites them and they become infected by this zombie virus."
It's not the only zombie network out there, either. Others you may have seen go by such alluring names as "linksys," "hpsetup," "tmobile" or "default."
A Trick That's A Treat For Hackers
No one knows for sure where Free Public WiFi began. One theory, Wright says, is that someone may have set it up as a joke. It might have been created to trick a friend into connecting "so he would get a Web page with some kind of a gross image or childish prank."
Unintentionally creating or connecting to the ad hoc network isn't inherently harmful, despite its virus-like spread. It does, however, provide an access point for hackers to come in and check out the user's files.
Part of Wright's job is to hack into a company's wireless network in order to expose vulnerabilities. When he sees Free Public WiFi, he says, "we break out the champagne."
"Because I know at that point I will be able to get unlimited access to internal resources just from that one starting point."
“I am troubled by the devaluing of the word ‘design’. I find myself now being somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer. In fact I prefer the German term, Gestalt-Ingenieur. Apple and Vitsoe are relatively lone voices treating the discipline of design seriously in all corners of their businesses. They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously.”
- Dieter Rams
Shared by Nicolas
The MultiPlane Camera that inspired the Parallax scrolling technique
Triforcing means leaving a post using Unicode to mimic the three-triangle icon of pop- ular video game The Legend of Zelda:
Newcomers will be taunted by a challenge that 'newfags can’t triforce.' Uninitiated users will then copy and paste an existing triforce into their reply. It will look like a correct tri- force in the reply field; however, after posting, the alignment is wrong. The only way to display high status and produce a correct triforce on 4chan is to use a complicated series of Unicode character codes.
During WW II Lockheed (unbelievable
1940s pictures). This is a version of special effects
during the 1940's.
I have never seen these pictures or knew that we had
gone this far to protect ourselves.
During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed
to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect
it from a possible Japanese air attack. They covered it
with camouflage netting to make it look like a rural
subdivision from the air.
Before...
After..
The person I received this from said she got back an
interesting story about someone's mother
who worked at
Lockheed, and she as a younger child, remembers all
this. And to this day,
it is the first pictures of it
she's seen.
Another person who lived in the area talked about as
being a boy, watching it all be set up like a movie
studio production. They had fake houses, trees, etc.
and moved parked cars around so it looked like a
residential area from the skies overhead.
Note.... I lived in North Long Beach during World
War II, I was 13 years old. (1940) The Long Beach
airport was near Lakewood, CA. There was a large
Boeing Plant there. If you would drive down Carson St. going south you could drive under the camouflage
netting. Ed Pollard
I am 85 and had much of my pilot training in Calif. I
have been under this net and have seen it from the air.
During preflight training I rode a bus under the net
and was very surprised as I didn't know it was there.
It was strong enough to walk on and they hired people
to ride bicycles and move around as if they lived there
to make it look authentic.
Warren Holmgreen Jr
From Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (found here), an anecdote about how Charles Schwab wordlessly motivated the workers in one of his steel mills.
Charles Schwab had a mill manager whose people weren't producing their quota of work.
"How is it," Schwab asked him, "that a manager as capable as you can't make this mill turn out what it should?"
"I don't know," the manager replied. "I've coaxed the men, I've pushed them, I've sworn and cussed, I've threatened them with damnation and being fired. But nothing works. They just won't produce."
This conversation took place at the end of the day, just before the night shift came on. Schwab asked the manager for a piece of chalk, then, turning to the nearest man, asked: "How many heats did your shift make today?"
"Six."
Without another word, Schwab chalked a big figure six on the floor, and walked away.
When the night shift came in, they saw the "6" and asked what it meant.
"The big boss was in here today," the day people said.
"He asked us how many heats we made, and we told him six. He chalked it down on the floor."
The next morning Schwab walked through the mill again. The night shift had rubbed out "6" and replaced it with a big "7."
When the day shift reported for work the next morning, they saw a big "7" chalked on the floor. So the night shift thought they were better than the day shift did they? Well, they would show the night shift a thing or two. The crew pitched in with enthusiasm, and when they quit that night, they left behind them an enormous, swaggering "10." Things were stepping up.
Shortly this mill, which had been lagging way behind in production, was turning out more work than any other mill in the plant.
The principle?
Let Charles Schwab say it in his own words: "The way to get things done," says Schwab, "is to stimulate competition. I do not mean in a sordid, money-getting way, but in the desire to excel."
The desire to excel! The challenge! Throwing down the gauntlet! An infallible way of appealing to people of spirit.
(thx, marko)
Tags: Charles Schwab Dale Carnegie working
